Happy New year. First off I wanted to first say how extremely happy I am with Gopro. I have been a gopro consumer since December 2014 with the go hero4 silver and just last January 2017 with the Gopro hero5 black. I’ve been so happy with Gopro that just a couple of weeks ago we bought a Gopro karma drone as a Christmas Gift to myself since my wife and I travel a lot and we love breathtaking photos and videos.
It wasn’t until yesterday (New Years Eve) That I tested it for the first time when we decided to celebrate new years eve out of town in the province. I live in the city and roughly 3 miles away from a major airport, so I cant fly it here.
I was able to fly it twice yesterday in an open field in the neighborhood I was staying at and it was very user friendly and fun. I always kept it in a line of sight view, and even when it went to maximum altitude (400 feet) we could still see it from the ground as a small dot. I landed the drone when I received the alert that there was a 4 minutes left on the battery.
This morning (New Years day) I did another drone flight with the Karma before we headed back into the city that afternoon. Since I had flown the day before, I wanted to take better footage. I let it go about as high as 130 feet and it traveled about 250 feet away (still within line of sight) then out of nowhere the controls became unresponsive as I was I trying to control it before it went out of sight and then the screen froze. When the screen was frozen, I got a notification saying that it will autoland and a countdown sequence for 3 minutes started but there was still no signal and could not see any video. The karma drone had started to drift away quickly from the area I was flying. As soon as I saw the screen froze, I started chasing where the drone could land which at that point was out of sight because it was over a brick wall where a pineapple field is at. The last image that was on the controller was over top of a pineapple field by the neighborhood where I was staying at. I hopped over the 8 foot brick barrier where the pineapple fields were and checked for it. I know it could have landed close by where the last image was. I checked neighboring pineapple fields and sought out help from others to help but didn’t have any success. The area that I think it landed must have been probably the size of a football field and we must have swept that area 4-5 times and it was no here to be found. Perhaps it landed further away from the area where we are looking at. I asked a women nearby and she said she heard it when she was on her porch which means it was flying low when she heard it. She also checked her roof didn’t see anything.
To make a long story short, I spend my new year’s late morning and midafternoon looking for the drone before it got dark. I gave the people who live in the neighborhood and the farmers at the pineapple field an incentive if they were to find it. Almost 5 hours later and with a lot of cuts and scrapes on my leg from jumping the brick wall and going through the pinapple fields, we had no luck. Im confident that the drone should be In that vicinity or If it hit a tree I’m sure it would have probably fallen onto the ground. Its not that hard to notice because its white and black. After the tiring day trying to find it I gave my number to the guards of the gated subdivision a bit of money as an incentive to help find it. I held the controller the entire time trying to look for it and I thought I was close when I clicked maps and saw the last known location. When I went to that location, It was the field where I let the drone fly.
My wife and I are just completely upset and have been searching about how I can go bout taking care of this problem. TO be honest, im devastated, but trying to keep my composure. She is asleep right now and I think I’m going to lose sleep trying to find a solution for this. Fortunately I was able to backup some photos, but I was unable to backup new years eves videos and photos I took on my gopro hero5 black.
We arrived home this evening at 830pm after 4 and half hours of travel due to traffic. The whole ride home I was thinking of a solution and when I was at stop lights or stuck in traffic I read that this has been a problem with the gopro firs gen karma drone loses signal, the pilot loses control of the drone and it lands somewhere. Ive read on other forums that im not the only one who has had this problem with their karma drone. Fortunately some people though I read were able to retrieve their drone, some peoples drones were gone and lost like mine. Is there anything tht GoPro can do because of this. My wife and I are so disappointed right now and wouldn’t like to start 2018 off on a negative note because of this error on gropro hat I’ve read has happened to many other pilots.
I have proof of purchase of my gopro karma and gopro hero 5 karma. And they were all purchase in 2017.
Please help. What can I do? Who do I speak with? I have already uploaded my flight log. If you need the email associated with mygopro acount my email address
[email protected] my controller SN is :E5131424570915
Thanks!